Ottawa suffering under its top politician too

Think T.O. has problems? At least the Prime Minister isn’t bashing your reason for being

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, see on a convention video screen, was in front of his Conservative Party faithful in Calgary on Nov. 1 when he railed against the "elites" and the courts that beset him so back in Ottawa.

By:susan delacourtottawa bureau, Published on Fri Nov 08 2013

Sure, Toronto’s reputation has taken a bit of a hit during this past crazy week or two in Canadian politics. While it may be difficult, spare a thought for the image of Ottawa too.

It hasn’t been a great few weeks for the national capital in the news either, above and beyond the follies in the Senate.

Toronto and Ottawa, for very different reasons, have become targets for ridicule this fall, through no real fault of their citizens.

While Toronto’s citizens are asking not to be judged by what their leader does, for instance, Ottawa’s residents are asking not to be viewed by what the Prime Minister says. And if it’s true that a good proportion of Torontonians believe they deserve better at the top, the man at the top in Ottawa has been making clear that he finds the city wanting.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is Ottawa’s most reluctant resident. He’s the outsider in the big house at 24 Sussex Drive — and he’s keen to share his disdain for the city in which he finds himself.

If you listened closely to Harper’s speech to Conservative loyalists about a week ago in Calgary, it was hard not to see him as a man held hostage in enemy territory.

To hear Harper explain things, he’s trying his best to make it work in Ottawa, but he’s being thwarted at every turn by political rivals or the media or the courts lurking everywhere in this hostile capital. Yes, he mentioned the courts. The same man who asked the Supreme Court to guide him on how to reform the Senate is now saying that that this whole business of doing things by the legal books is an obstacle in his path.

It’s a bit like a municipal official asking the chief of police to step aside, to get out of the way during a political investigation — but that wouldn’t happen in real life or a working democracy, would it?

The courts are just part of the Prime Minister’s problems with Ottawa.

In his Calgary speech, Harper made it clear that he and his wife came to Ottawa a decade ago against their better judgment.

“We didn’t go to Ottawa to join private clubs or become part of some elite,” he said, evoking the image of the capital as one big, dark, smoky backroom; the aforementioned “elites” sipping brandy and puffing on cigars bought at the expense of the hardworking taxpayers.

In real life, Ottawa isn’t that bad a city. Honestly. It’s filled with people who do work hard every day, many of them in the public service.

According to the latest missives coming from Harper’s government, these public servants aren’t working for you and me, or even Harper, but instead for “union bosses” — no doubt housed somewhere else in the capital, in yet another dark room full of cigar-smoking elites.

“Look, I know some of the union bosses are upset and they’re going to light their hair on fire and say how horrible this is,” Treasury Board Tony Clement said in a recent, testy interview with local CBC Radio. He was talking about a surprise measure mentioned in the Throne Speech, which would give the government the right to designate essential services in the case of looming strikes with the public servants.

It was said this week that Toronto continues to be a great, thriving city, despite the problems with the mayor — that a visitor to downtown Toronto, oblivious to the headlines, would still see a city functioning as normal.

Perhaps it’s just coincidence, but the same cannot be said of downtown Ottawa.

Any visitor to the streets around the Parliament buildings will find a scene of torn-up streets, construction mess and block-long rows of empty, historic buildings and abandoned stores. The downtown core of Ottawa looks like it’s in the midst of some disaster-recovery operation, thanks to the Public Works department.

Glass-half-full people will say that this downtown mess is a sign of hope — a government intent on taking a hatchet to the public service is still gutting great buildings to create more office cubicles. Who knows? Maybe a government that’s creating a museum of history across the river in Gatineau will find a way to showcase the history of the buildings it has rendered to dust immediately in front of Parliament.

But it is kind of eerie how the physical condition of downtown Ottawa, especially in the streets around Parliament Hill, is coming to resemble the wrecking-ball rhetoric about the city.

Toronto’s residents have been assured that their mayor still loves his city, despite his troubles. Citizens of Ottawa, navigating through the wreckage around the Parliament buildings, are not likely to make the same claim about the Prime Minister.

Ottawa bureau member Susan Delacourt’s new book is Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (Douglas & McIntyre). It is available for purchase at StarStore.ca/delacourt